Monday, November 26, 2012

Settling Back In...

It turned out to be a pretty crazy four-day weekend and I can't believe it's already over. Usually four days away from work feels nearly perfect--enough time to recover but not enough time to get too used to the feeling of freedom. But this time around there just weren't enough hours in the day to get everything done--including relaxing, which was much needed as well. I spent much of the weekend decorating the house for Christmas, culminating in finishing up the tree last night. I took a lot of breaks and watched some TV. Jacob played and colored (and whined and talked back...). Craig worked. He did get his Knighthawks championship ring on Friday night, which was cool. But he had a full day (literally--he didn't get home until about midnight) on Saturday. I got my car Friday night, but for whatever reason (cold weather, perhaps?) I couldn't motivate myself to go out to the garage and get my car all set up--put things back in the glove compartment, sort through the stuff I pulled out of my car in a hurry after the accident, set my radio stations, play with the settings, etc.--which I'm somewhat regretting today since I'm now fighting the distraction of wanting to figure it all out mid-drive. I didn't even start reading Thursday's or Sunday's papers (all those ads going to waste...), and barely got a couple other items on my to do list finished up. It was still a productive weekend, though. It's just unfortunate that I am SO tired today. I was hoping to come back refreshed but that didn't really happen.

On top of it, we have to head back to Buffalo tonight because Craig's great uncle passed away over the weekend. We're happy to go, of course, but it doesn't make it much easier to get back in the groove when we're packing up again and headed back down the Thruway after one day back at work. It should make the week go more quickly, however, and the best news of all is that I'm off most of next week to use up the week of vacation that would have otherwise been used for the trip to Florida. I have a whole list ready to go for those four days off and I just hope I maintain some level of motivation to actually do it all. Jacob will be going to daycare all but one of those days, since I promised him that we'd do a mother-son trip to Strong Museum. I figured we should take advantage since we're able to go at a time when everyone else is in school and the place won't be mobbed. The rest of the week will be spent Christmas shopping, cleaning, and organizing. I have a boatload of donations to record for tax purposes, and I'd really like to put my VHS-to-DVD converter to use while I have some large chunks of time to focus on it. Craig also mentioned spending a day together if he can pull it off. His 40th birthday is next week but I'm not planning anything elaborate. Call me a bad wife, but given that I'm pregnant, it's Christmastime, and I'm still mentally recovering from the accident upheaval, I'm just not sure what to do. Our families are pretty much all in Buffalo, Craig has a Knighthawks preseason game the following Saturday, and Jacob's Sunday School Christmas program is that Sunday. My parents will be on vacation that weekend and I'm not sure if Craig's immediate family would be up for a trip here just for the few hours we'd have on Sunday evening. We don't have many close friends, but we do have a good number of acquaintances who I'm sure would be happy to celebrate a bit, so I'm thinking of just putting an open invite out on Facebook to meet us somewhere. Nothing set, exactly, just "We'll be having dinner here and would love if you'd be around at the same time..." or something along those lines. Is that terrible?

Still, despite everything, being able to go to work in my own car this morning (different though it might be) was one step toward getting back to normal. Everything still feels a little "off", almost like I just can't entirely process what's happened in the past couple weeks. Everything was sort of compounded by the holiday and being out of our normal routines as it is. I'm constantly checking on what I'm bringing with me out of the house, since I've been toting around my garage door opener, parking pass, EZ Pass, and various electronics cords separate from my car for the past week and a half. I'm just out of my usual groove and it tends to throw everything off.

Even the mere fact that I'm pregnant is causing me a little bit of disbelief at times. Depending on how busy I am or how little the baby is moving, it's easy to get caught up in other things and momentarily forget this baby is there. That's so weird to me considering that my belly is getting hard to ignore, but I guess there's just a lot of other things going on. Thinking back to my last car accident, I recall this same feeling of being "off", but I also recall a major onset of "pregnancy brain" where I seemed to forget a lot of stuff. I don't really feel like that was the case this time (or if it was, I haven't remembered any of it yet), but I'm sure pregnancy alone would have complicated a lot of things. I wonder if I should credit the detail-oriented world of motherhood with keeping the "pregnancy brain" to a minimum thus far, since the million things I need to remember as a mom may be keeping my brain in tip-top shape. It would be quite ironic since most of the time I feel like a spaz, but perhaps compared to pregnancy brain this is pretty good. I will say that there's been a prevailing sense of mental exhaustion since the accident, where at times I just don't want to delve into the deeper details of things because it's just too exhausting to think about, but eventually I work up to it and I do what I have to do. It's all been a bit of a process, but slowly but surely I think things will get back to normal.

Of course, another thing I didn't do was get out my camera and pull off pictures, so that will come another day, I promise. Soon.